The Kevin Show

by Mary Pilon

  With the competition looming just a couple of weeks away, Kevin asked his doctors questions about whether he would be able to do sit-ups and workouts with sutures. His school and sailing were layered on top of monthly blood tests and regular CAT scans that doctors said were still necessary to ensure that the disease was under control. His medical brain trust was wary, and told Kevin that it was crucial for him to augment his workouts slowly and pay close attention to what his body was telling him. He didn’t fully ingest their advice and began working out as he saw fit alongside his teammates. Slowly, but surely, Kevin was worming his way back onto competitive waters. Surgery in October and competition in November didn’t seem crazy to him, even if those around him were aghast.

  By the time Kevin arrived at the NCAA sailing competition at Gull Lake in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he felt both locked into the sport and somehow detached from it, as though he was on autopilot, just coasting through the movements of competing for the 1990 title. Some of his detachment was due to the medication, and some to his desire to deny the pain of cancer and bipolar disorder and focus on the one thing that had always brought him happiness: achievement on the water.

  Kevin yearned for the NCAA title, but those around him hedged their expectations. They were just excited he was alive and while Kevin’s fitness rebound astonished them, they also knew how hard it was to win a collegiate title under even the best circumstances. With his mother and teammates watching, Kevin soared across the large oval of water, located west of Detroit and south of Grand Rapids. It was freezing in the biting kind of way one finds only in the Midwest in November, a relentless frigidity that many locals endure with a stoic smile.

  Much to everyone’s astonishment, Kevin, the bipolar cancer survivor, charged into second place.

  He couldn’t have felt more ashamed.

  SUSANNE

  Kevin had not only competed but conquered. Watching him glide across the water in the distance, Susanne was elated. For him to have come so close to winning the title after what he had been through shocked her and his teammates.

  Susanne rushed to tell Kevin after the race how proud she was of him, and she meant it. But neither her words nor his accomplishment seemed to be sinking in. Kevin’s shoulders were slumped, his post-regatta demeanor melancholy. There seemed to be nothing she or anyone else could say to reverse his disappointment at winning second place. There’s some research that indicates bronze medalists are actually happier52 than silver medalists, the thinking being that they’re less likely than a silver medalist to engage in counterfactual thinking, or dwelling on what might have been. They’re happy to have made it to the podium. That wasn’t dissimilar from how Susanne viewed Kevin’s NCAA performance: getting to the competition, especially after the mania, the depression, cancer, was the accomplishment.

  Frustrated, confused, and saddened, Susanne kept smiling and hoped that Kevin would shake it off.

  KEVIN

  Kevin ended up winning a collegiate title at the NCAA championships as part of Brown’s overall sailing team. Even though he hadn’t won first place in the Singlehandeds, his points from that race had contributed to the win. Technically speaking, he had a collegiate title, even if it wasn’t the one he set out to snag.

  Nevertheless, a sense of imposter syndrome washed over Kevin—the feeling that he was a fraud, that his success to this point was undeserved and had come about through luck rather than real ability. He also feared that if he could not repeat his success, he could be exposed for being incompetent, false before the world. Researchers first observed imposter syndrome53 in high-performing women in collegiate and professional environments who felt unable to take ownership of their successes and abilities. Sports provide fertile ground for imposter syndrome for women and men as well, with champions working their whole lives to earn a specific title. If attained, it can feel unreal, undeserved, and a winner may have to defend her prowess against others on a regular basis and in a realm in which success is measured in clear, but arbitrary, metrics. Then there’s the risk of the sudden loss of self-esteem that comes with feeling that they have failed to live up to an idealized image.54

  Kevin was still young enough to try to fill out his sailing résumé with America’s Cup wins, and, most coveted of all, an Olympic gold medal. Maybe those victories would feel different, he thought, the crowning achievements of a perfect career, well-earned titles that promised the satisfaction of knowing one had reached the zenith of one’s sport and earned a place in history.

  Meanwhile, Kevin read whatever books and academic articles he could find about bipolar disorder, researching it as he would a French literature paper or math theorem. It was comforting to know that he wasn’t alone, but he struggled with the idea of possible brilliance. Was he on track to become the athletic version of Ernest Hemingway? Or was he just one of many ordinary people who was merely trying to get through the day? Many of the memoirs and books he read romanticized mania, portraying it as a world that only certain people could access, people who were members of some sort of elite club. In an odd way, that portrayal made the weight of pursuing the Olympics feel that much heavier for Kevin. If he was a sailing savant, did that mean he had more space in which to be crazy, as it was the price to pay for being a high achiever? But without the inspired performances on the water, then who was he? Was he just crazy? And if so, what did that mean?

  Increasingly, the parallels between the worlds in books and the plotlines of The Show were clear and soothing to Kevin. He eased into fiction the way one eases into a comfortable reclining chair, the voices of authors he had never met seeming to blend with the nuances of the strange world he was introduced to in Boston. James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon were among his favorite authors, speaking to him directly in a way those immediately connected to his world couldn’t. He thought of Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which centers on several characters’ quest to find the secret of a mysterious “black device.” Kevin wondered whether, like the book, a fusion of science, philosophy, and culture, he wasn’t on a similar multidisciplinary quest at times, and like the hunt for the black device, the stakes were just as high: saving the world.

  Kevin graduated from Brown in 1991 with two majors, math and French literature—a reflection, he was the first to say, of his bipolar brain. Math spoke to his love of practicality and precision, French to his escapist, contortionist side. He thought of Joseph Campbell, who wrote of his soul being in a state of unrest as his inner and outer worlds failed to reconcile themselves. It was easy to recite Campbellian platitudes about following one’s bliss, but far more complicated to figure out how to execute that in a day-to-day manner.

  Amanda still had three more years of schooling to complete, but she and Kevin remained a serious couple. So serious that Amanda’s family pressed Kevin on the question that befalls many a college student: What was he going to do with himself after graduating?

  Kevin had to think about his long-term plan. To him, the idea of making a living at sailing seemed a far-off dream with no clear path to reach it. Meanwhile, Amanda had some catching up to do in Providence. She was normally an A student, but her grades had slipped her freshman year.

  She knew whom to blame for that.

  •

  Kevin landed some work coaching and moved into a small apartment in Bristol, Rhode Island, to finish up a thesis he’d started while at Brown, an ambitious analysis of the love letters of Marguerite Duras and Beethoven. Kevin argued that Beethoven’s famous “Immortal Beloved” letter wasn’t written for a particular recipient, but was rather directed at love itself, an epic missive against loneliness and sorrow.55 As he wove in the words of Duras, he wrote that those who wondered to whom Beethoven was addressing his letter had missed the point—it was about Beethoven combating alienation, about the identity of the sender rather than the recipient. Kevin had already been awarded his degree, so the thesis wasn’t required, but he was eager to finish it and discussed it at length during office hours with one of
his favorite professors. She admired his gusto, but privately worried about whether his writing the paper was a good idea, given his earlier breakdown. Nonetheless, Kevin insisted that he felt fine and that the research and writing was invigorating to him.

  With team and collegiate sailing behind him, Kevin could now focus on a new sailing challenge: the Finn, a single-person boat and one of the several classes of boats in the Olympics. The Finn suited him well, being among the most physical and tactical of the Olympic classes. Debuting at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952, it was a finesse game, much like surfing, but necessitated strength and raw power. Finn sailors tried to bulk up their weight with as much muscle as possible. The weight helped the feathery craft move, earning those athletes the nickname “gorillas on the water.”56

  To prepare for sailing in the Finn class, Kevin built up to a weight of 210 to 220 pounds of mostly muscle on his six-foot frame, a far cry from his resting weight of 175 pounds. In junior and collegiate sailing, Kevin had focused on general fitness, as had his sailing peers, but the level of precision required for Olympic competition57 was completely new for him, with each pound and workout counting for an opportunity that came only once every four years. Kevin’s shifting in and out of sailing classes meant that his weight yo-yoed, further knotting up his already complicated relationship with his body. His bipolar disorder medication had the propensity to add bloat, and like most human beings, Kevin struggled at times to maintain willpower over his diet. Half or even all of a pizza seemed more substantial than a slice, even though he knew the risks of indulging in junk foods. Whenever he succumbed to a food binge, the loss of control scared him and made him question whether his medications were working as intended. Or whether what he was feeling was what everyone else felt and was therefore whatever “normal” was supposed to be. He deconstructed the issue over and over again in his mind, wondering if he had some sort of eating disorder to add to his already thick medical chart, or if overeating was a manifestation of his mania, an exuberance for the sweet or savory. Then again, maybe he was just a hungry athlete, or it was some kind of side effect of the meds. Then the guilt of overeating arrived and triggered a cycle of regret that he knew all too well. It seemed as if whenever one arena of his life was on the upswing, another, even a seemingly simple one like nutrition, plummeted. He could never win.58

  The Finn class (Wikimedia Commons)

  Although his doctors had told him to avoid caffeine, as it might trigger a manic episode, Kevin began to drink one cup after another. It had been more than a year since his episode in Boston. Maybe it had been a one-time event, after all.

  That would turn out to be wishful thinking.

  •

  With his French thesis completed, Kevin and several young sailors gathered at Logan Airport in Boston to head to Japan. Kevin was eager to compete again, this time at the Japanese-American Intercollegiate Goodwill Games, a competition that brought together top collegiate-level teams from around the world, part of Japan’s broader efforts to bolster its sailing culture59 prior to the America’s Cup.

  The competition didn’t go as well as Kevin had hoped, however. Sailing with a female teammate from Brown, he came in fourth place. It seemed to Kevin that he hadn’t had enough time to practice with his partner in their boat, yet during the competition, he had been completely immersed in the process, unconcerned with whether they were winning or not. There simply hadn’t been time for those thoughts in the moment.

  After the competition was over, the group of young sailors headed out to let loose on Tokyo’s fast, bright streets for some celebratory drinking and sightseeing. Things with the group seemed relatively tame, but Kevin, with what he felt was his lack of preparation for the race replaying in his mind, could feel the presence of the Director, back from Boston, nearby. He was summoning Kevin into The Show.

  At the end of the evening, Kevin headed back to the hotel with his friends. They bade each other good night, everyone assuming that Kevin, like the rest of them, would go up to his hotel room and sleep until morning, when they were due to catch their flight back to the United States.

  The Director had other ideas.

  •

  Kevin crossed Tokyo’s loud, clustered, traffic-jammed streets with his eyes closed. Instead of marveling at the remarkable luck he was having in not getting seriously injured or killed, he was reasoning that there was a silent army of people on hand protecting and supporting him. The Director wouldn’t want to kill off his lead actor.60 Once again Kevin was being selected for a special mission. The traffic felt as if it was choreographed around him in an elegant ballet. The cameras were rolling.

  It’s unclear the order in which Kevin went wandering about Tokyo, but at some point, he found a basketball and began dribbling it, seeing his behavior as a form of performance art connected to the popularity of the NBA back home. As he examined the ball’s patriotic palate of red, white, and blue coloring, it seemed to him like a remarkable coincidence as an American abroad. Beautiful, even. How did people know? Perhaps they were The Show’s sponsors. A big part of Kevin’s mission in The Show was becoming clear: it was up to him to manipulate the global economy for altruistic purposes.

  Kevin came upon a truck parked on the street and tried to open the door. It was unlocked, which was well-executed staging. He sat in the driver’s seat, flipped down a sun visor61 and, to his surprise, there were the keys to the ignition. The Director must have found out that Kevin was a fan of Terminator 2, a film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger also found a truck, opened its door, and flipped down a sun visor to find the ignition keys. If that wasn’t a sign of being on The Show, Kevin didn’t know what was. Maybe it wasn’t a surprise, rather, a true feeling of synchronicity.

  He began driving around recklessly, thinking about another popular Schwarzenegger science-fiction film of the moment, Total Recall. As he jerked the wheel to and fro, he considered the tale of a construction worker who battles with his memories and wonders about those who are trying to control them. Kevin felt sure that there were hidden messages in that film that would tell him who he was supposed to be in The Show’s Tokyo episode. He wondered if Amanda, back stateside, had been selected for The Show as well, and if she was being groomed to be his leading lady.62 Surely the appearance of a smart, blonde, beautiful college sweetheart in his life was no coincidence, but a strategic casting move for future episodes.

  After driving around for a while, Kevin parked the truck, leaving the keys in the ignition, and walked around. He reached a building with computers inside and a sign reading GENIUS SCHOOL.63 Much to his dismay, the building was locked. Then, as he had done in Boston, he became fascinated with climbing poles, walls, and whatever else could be scaled. He shed his shirt and sailing shoes and made his way to the Tokyo Imperial Palace, a popular tourist destination. The Director had chosen this site for Kevin’s coronation, of course.

  Kevin wandered the imperial grounds, clad in nothing but his sweat pants. He was in awe of the palace’s dramatic pointed roof, its lush landscape of meticulously manicured trees and grass, its waterside placement, and its central white edifice, a building that was majestic and exotic, unlike anything to be found in Ventura or Providence. Kevin marveled at the site’s history, tranquility, and regal nature, and that it was ensconced by flickering billboard screens, signage in a language he couldn’t read, bright and edgy fashion and spikey hair, all seemingly so futuristic compared to anything he had seen in the United States. Real estate in Tokyo64 had recently sold for as much as $139,000 a square foot, making the land even more valuable than prime real estate back home and a fitting location for a scene in The Show.

  It was there, on the pricey, revered site, that the police came.

  •

  Although Kevin’s French-speaking abilities were sound, his Japanese language skills were nonexistent. One officer after another passed Kevin around at the local police station, confounded by the language barrier, as well as the circumstances in which the clean-cut American young m
an had been found. Somehow he was ultimately released from police custody without being charged, but once outside, Kevin realized that he couldn’t remember where his hotel was. Finally, though, still feeling as if he were on The Show, he found his way back, just as his teammates were leaving for the airport.

  On the bus with them, Kevin looked out the window and began to quietly cry. The Show was becoming confusing, and suddenly it felt as though he was no longer in control. Any free will he had was lost, the future was scripted beyond his control, and the past reeked of having been manufactured, a lie. Yet at the same time, the world reverberated with overwhelming beauty. No one around him, in spite of their best intentions, seemed to get it, or the jarring juxtaposition of it all, nor did Kevin know where to even begin.

  As the young sailors stepped into Tokyo’s airport, bustling with people racing for their flights, they all kept a close eye on Kevin. They could see that he wasn’t himself, sniffling, singing, muttering nonsensical phrases under his breath. They couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps he was just stressed out from the competition and the looming overseas flight. Surely it would pass. He seemed harmless and almost childlike in his carelessness and wonder at things that were commonplace: the automatic sliding doors, the lines of people checking in to retrieve their tickets, the hive of cars ferrying passengers in and out of the arrivals hall.

  Kevin smiled and handed his passport to the ticket agent—a good sign that whatever had gotten into him was shaking its way out, his teammates thought. Moments later, Kevin felt overwhelmed and that he needed to escape. He ran downstairs and fixed his eyes on the baggage carousel.